Quoting Tristan McLeay <kesuari@...>:
> Adam Walker wrote:
>
> > Wait a minute maybe not my bad.
> >
> Please don't send HTML emails. Many people won't be able to read your
> message.
>
> The trailing -n in 'don on' and 'don off' is the Middle English
> infinitive from before it was replaced by the to preposition. The
> actual
> words that were contracted probably didn't have this 'n' in them.
Replaced by? German does still retain the infinitival _-n_ in _zu tun_ "to
do", but as seen still uses the preposition to. So I'd been sort of assuming
this infinitival marker was inherited from the common ancestor ... am I wrong?
Andreas